Monday, January 30, 2017

I wrote recently about how to have a good rally (hopefully as a small component of a broader movement that includes lots of other tactics). I emphasized the importance of music and culture in any successful social movement. Now I'll get more specific, and share with you my own songs that are especially relevant to the current situation. Lots of other people have written relevant songs as well, and you'll find some of them on my Song News Network feed.Here's my Trump Protest Playlist on Soundcloud, all in one place. Below, links to individual songs, and an explanation for why they're in the playlist.

When Trump was campaigning for the presidency and he first talked about banning Muslims from entering the US, Islamic State started using him in their propaganda videos, as anyone could have predicted. I wrote "God's Gift to the Caliphate" at that time, in late 2015.

It was only a couple weeks after that speech that Muslim passengers on a bus on the Kenya-Somalia border prevented Al Shabab from massacring Christian passengers (which they had done almost exactly a year earlier). I wrote "One Day in Kenya" as a tribute to the courage of these Muslim bus passengers who risked their own lives to save others (and as a sneaky way to criticize the xenophobes like Trump).

More recently, riffing off of Trump's main campaign slogan, I wrote a critical but hopeful appraisal of my homeland -- "America Has Never Been So Great" (but it could be).

When Trump banned Syrian refugees from coming to the US, regardless of where they might have been at in the long, arduous process of applying for asylum in the United States, it reminded many people of other times the US had banned groups or nationalities from entering the country, such as in the years prior to 1944, when European Jews were an unwanted element, and the St Louis was turned away. "Send Them Back" is about that episode in 1939.

Another time that people in the US were collectively punished for their national origins was when FDR signed the decree that all people in the continental US of Japanese descent should be imprisoned in camps. Trump has expressed his deep approval of this sort of thing. Here's "Liberty and Justice For All."

As the presidential decrees continue to be announced, people across the US are pouring into the streets and airports in solidarity with their fellow human beings who are being targeted. Back in the 1840's, when the US targeting of Mexicans involved making war on the country and annexing most of it, there were many US soldiers who deserted from the ranks of the military, rather than fighting, once they saw that they were participating in a nakedly imperial, unprovoked attack on a neighboring country. Some of them expressed their solidarity by joining the Mexican Army. They were called the San Patricios -- "The St Patrick Battalion."

Trump is far from the first US president to target Mexicans and others from Latin America for abuse, expulsion, etc. Around 2000 I wrote "No One Is Illegal" about this longstanding discrimination against so many people in the US on the basis of the color of their skin, their national origin, etc.

Mexicans being institutionally second-class citizens in the US is a longstanding bedrock principle of the US economy. Lots of would-be migrants die trying to cross the border every year. "Guanajuato" is about one of them.

During the George W Bush administration, many people were asking the same questions that are being asked on a widespread basis today. Namely, is it possible to stand by in the face of such horrors? In Bush's case, those horrors involved witch hunts in the US against many Muslims -- which continued under the Obama administration, incidentally -- and daily massacres committed against the people of Iraq and Afghanistan by the US military and military contractors. In 2003 I asked, did you "Strike A Blow Against the Empire."

Along those lines, many people were asking whether there was grounds to impeach Bush for his war crimes, or for him to be arrested by some international court perhaps. I asked a question then that many people were asking then, and now -- "How Far Is It From Here to Nuremberg?"

I predicted Trump's victory and I was not surprised when he got elected. The Democratic Party had long ago abandoned the working class (aside from Sanders and a few others), and many people voted from Trump who used to vote for Democrats, in the assumption that they might defend their interests more than the (other) party of big business, the Republicans. I wondered how they would be feeling once they realized that they voted for their class enemy, in reality, and I wrote "The Biggest Landlord."

Just before Trump took office there was huge speculation in the media and society at large about what he would actually do -- how would his tweets be turned into policy? I wrote "What's Gonna Happen."

Many people in the US and abroad identify with the idea of the US as a haven for refugees, as represented eloquently on the Statue of Liberty. I grew up thinking like that, too. As the Obama administration was deporting huge numbers of Honduran and Guatemalan refugees during the wave of emigration that followed the US-sponsored military coup in Honduras in 2009, I wrote "Statue In the Harbor."

Trump's whole narrative around Muslims involves Muslims being barbaric terrorists with a general tendency towards backwardness of all kinds. The historical reality is very far from this narrative. No situation more eloquently presents this dichotomy than the events of 1492, when the Ottoman Empire sent its navy across the Mediterranean to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of Spanish Jews -- "1492."

Trump rails about terrorism, without acknowledging the basic, obvious fact that if you bomb somebody, they might just bomb you back -- "If You Bomb Somebody."

Under George W Bush, the US opened up lots of unofficial "black sites" where the CIA tortured people. Bush officially said torture was wrong, but that was just the official line -- the reality was completely different. Trump openly supports torture. When the Abu Ghraib scandal hit the press I wrote "After We Torture Our Prisoners."

Trump thinks patriotism is very important. He's even decreed that there should be a day where we show how patriotic we are -- in addition to July 4th and Flag Day and Presidents Day and all these other ones. Here's "God Bless the USA."

It's long been a desperate situation vis-a-vis the environment and climate change, and that's probably never been more true than today, both because we have never made the reforms to our society and energy grid that should have been made a long time ago, and because we now have an actual climate change denier in office -- "Here at the End of the World."

The Obama administration did too little, too late to help the folks at Standing Rock. Trump owns stock in the company that's building the pipeline, and is determined to see it built. Here's "Standing Rock."

Fracking has been banned in some parts of the US, because it's a terribly destructive practice that destroys the earth, air and especially the water. Trump is hoping to reverse these bans and impose the corporate will on the people. To which we say "No Fracking Way."

With deregulation and the promotion of ever more extraction of oil, gas, coal, etc., we will have lots more accidents such as the one that destroyed downtown Lac-Mégantic, Quebec -- "Oil Train."

As soon as Trump took office, Israel announced a massive program of settlement expansion. This is apparently not a coincidence. When the Israelis were building what is widely known as their Apartheid Wall in the occupied West Bank, I wrote "They're Building A Wall."

Some say Trump's election is evidence of severe divisions within the US ruling class caused by the desperation of their situation since the 2008 financial crisis, climate change, and other things. If that's true, then we need to kick capitalism while it's down -- "Kick It While It's Down."

Trump wants to deregulate everything even more than Reagan, Clinton and Bush did already. Which is really saying something, since those administrations collectively destroyed much of the regulatory infrastructure that this country used to have. Deregulation of industry will directly lead to people dying in larger numbers in industrial accidents such as this one in Hamlet, North Carolina that I wrote about in "Sometimes I Walk the Aisles."

There has been extreme violence meted out before and during the Obama years, directed at people of color, certain ones in particular. While Obama talked about bringing the country together and mitigating the racial divide and relationship between "law enforcement" and the general population, Trump wants none of that subtle stuff, and just proudly proclaims himself to be the "Law and Order" president. Under Trump, we can expect many more police killings such as that of Eric Garner -- "I Can't Breathe."

With the unleashing of the "Alt Right" and other white supremacists these days, combined with Trump's desire to weaken gun laws even more, we can expect many more massacres of all sorts. Such as the one in Charleston, South Carolina which I wrote about in "The State House Lawn."

Trump is emboldening the anti-abortion movement with his vice presidential pick especially. Elements of the anti-abortion movement are very violent. They kill doctors and nurses and bomb health clinics "In The Name of God."

Traditionally, when you're being oppressed by rich people trying to get even richer, you have to rebel to get anything changed around here. That's what the tenant farmers of upstate New York did in the 1840's, against massive property owners like Trump and his daddy. Except the Drumpf family was still in Germany in the 1840's, during the Rent Strike Wars. Here's "Landlord."

If Wall Street ever needed to be Occupied, it's now, with more billionaires in the cabinet than ever before. Many of them former Goldman Sachs officials. Here's "Occupy Wall Street."

Years before the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon, the people of Iceland rebelled against the deregulation and corruption that had resulted in the Global Financial Crisis that Trump and his policies personify -- "Iceland, 2008."

Since Forecloser-In-Chief Mnuchin is part of the cabinet, we can forget about any People's Bailout. Here's "A Dream Foreclosed."

I don't know where Trump's intense hostility towards China is going to end us up, but I know what happened during the first trade war against China led by the UK, the US, France, Russia and others back in the 1830's -- lots and lots of Chinese people died, in order to force the Chinese government to allow the UK to export their deadly opium. Here's "Trade War."

In the darkest times it's crucial to remember that well-organized, big, militant social movements can change everything, anytime, anywhere -- "Everything Can Change."

One of the popular sayings during the anticapitalist movement that I was involved with at the end of Bill Clinton's presidency was "We Are Everywhere." An important thing to remember, when it can seem not to be the case.

Trump's cabinet picks make it very clear who he thinks the world belongs to -- other billionaires. Lots of the leaders of the Democratic and Republican parties seem to agree on this principle. Many of us protesting Trump don't. We think the world is a commons, that should be shared. It's "The Commons."

Saturday, January 28, 2017

Many, many people are hitting the streets in recent weeks in the United States. For most of them, my guess is they're doing it for the first time. I say this because every time I go to a major protest, I ask lots of random people if they have been to many other such protests. Most people, young and old, tell me this is their first one.

Since the recent upsurge in protest activity, a lot of long-time activist types have been writing helpful things about what kind of movement we need, and which way forward. Other people have been writing distinctly unhelpful things. And then whether their perspective is helpful or not, it can easily run the risk of seeming patronizing.

Those of us who have been involved with different social movements for a long time who have learned anything from the experience probably have a universal desire not to see mistakes we have made many times before get repeated again. Of course we know that many of these mistakes will be made again, and to no small extent we are now watching that happen -- and we're preaching condescendingly about it in some cases, or participating more usefully in ongoing developments in other cases (or some of both).

I do have a lot of opinions on what kind of movement we need to take on Trump and his cabinet of xenophobes, racists, and former Goldman Sachs employees. Namely, the same kind of movement we would have needed to take on the last cabinet full of former Goldman Sachs employees. The kind of movement that has brought governments and corporations to their knees in the past -- big, inclusive, militant, with lots of very frequent bouts of mass civil disobedience, which can take different forms at different points in history and in different societies.

But as a professional performer who specializes in singing at protest rallies for the past 25 years or so, I feel like the most useful thing for me to focus on in terms of any advice involves the nitty gritty -- the logistics of pulling off that oft-maligned aspect of pretty much all social movements known as the protest rally or demonstration.

I'll be the first to say that effective movements always involve a lot more than just holding rallies in some public square for an afternoon and then everybody goes home. If such rallies are all that a movement involves, you can be sure it won't go anywhere.

But as a part of a broader social movement, the spectacle of the protest rally can play an important role in movement-building, if it's done right. If not done right, it can have exactly the opposite effect, and play an important role in movement-killing. In the interest of building the movement rather than killing it, I offer the following thoughts.

First a question: in the act of holding a protest rally, exactly what are we trying to achieve? And then the obvious followup: how do we achieve that?

Well, there may be many things we're trying to achieve through having a protest rally -- and some of them may be at cross-currents with each other. We often must prioritize one thing over another.

For example, one goal may be to have a really big demo. Another may be to use the occasion to educate the public about the issues at hand. Another may be to make sure we have an occasion where someone from every organization that came together to make the rally happen gets a chance to address the crowd.

While these are all sensible goals, they all risk losing the forest for the trees. It seems to me that the over-riding goal of this particular, small element of a social movement -- the protest rally -- should be to build the movement.

So the real question is, out of all the different strategies a social movement can employ to build itself, what role can a protest rally play in that?

My answer: it can foster a sense of community -- and with that, a sense of optimism. Optimism is the oxygen of social movements (and perhaps, to extend the metaphor, repression is the nitrogen). A social movement that is inclusive rather than cliquish, inspirational rather than preachy -- a movement with a culture, rather than an ad hoc collection of otherwise unrelated organizations coming together for a little while.

Most people attending the rally are already familiar with the situation. They don't need more people to tell them about it. That's depressing. They want people to talk about what plans they have for the near future in terms of future actions, protests, acts of civil disobedience, strikes, whatever is coming up.

Different people and organizations involved with the protest can find lots of ways of identifying themselves and their groups aside from taking up time on the stage telling us about their organizations. We need a movement that sees beyond that, and demonstrates this vision in many ways, including on the stages at the rallies, by prioritizing movement-building over station identification.

If movement-building requires optimism, and optimism requires a sense of inclusive community, then culture is the appropriate medium for the message. This can include really good speeches -- as long as the speakers are well aware that what they are doing, fundamentally, is theatrical in nature.

But it is music, poetry, skits, street theater, public art, giant puppets, marching bands that produce the oxygen at a rally.

These things don't all have to be political, but as long as the quality is there, it's usually better to prioritize politically relevant performers over performers who may be professional, or perhaps even really famous, but who don't have a powerful message that is related to the situation at hand.

The artists, musicians, comedians, actors, etc., are out there in huge numbers, all around you. If you don't know where to find them, where to connect with them, how to involve them in the rally you're organizing, then find out. Don't give up -- just go outside of your normal social circles and look in that cultural sphere. They'll be excited once you meet them -- they're already looking for you. They just don't know where to look for a protest organizer any more than you know where to find a horn player.

A bonus of protest organizers becoming well-connected with the cultural spheres is that stage hands know how to set up stages, musicians often know people who own sound systems, and they can teach you good microphone technique, which is essential for any speaker who wants to be taken seriously (and be heard).

In order to make this work well (that is, work), you need to think about things like whether you need to hire a sound company to run the stage (which obviously requires a budget of some kind), or whether this is something people with bits of equipment can cobble together themselves. If you're expecting crowds in the thousands, you'll definitely need to have a budget of at least a few hundred dollars to hire a sound company. If you're organizing something smaller than that, you may be able to easily cultivate the connections within the music scene that come with sound equipment.

In terms of attracting this kind of talent to your protests, you should know that what the artists who can make the protest an inspiring, worthwhile occasion want from you is to be taken seriously. That's all, really. Taking an artist seriously means understanding that they have needs in this situation. They need a sound system that is adequate for whatever they're doing -- which can vary wildly depending on whether we're talking about a 10-piece band or a singer with a guitar -- and they need an audience. So don't put the band on before the rally starts or after it ends. Put them on during the rally. Ideally with great frequency, and for long periods of time.

Keep your rally short. Leave them wanting more. This is theater, and all performers know these maxims. You need to, too. Two hours is a good maximum. Even that is long. All rallies, in my humble opinion, should be mostly music and other forms of culture, in terms of what happens on the stage. This is doubly true of any rally that's longer than two hours. If you're doing something like that, then you should look at it more as a festival than a rally. Which, really, is equally appropriate for the shorter rallies, as well.

If a rally is really good, well-timed, well-executed, and mostly cultural in nature, it shouldn't lose people as it goes. It may even grow in size as it goes on. This is a sign that there is an energy being created by the confluence of successful factors you have brought together that day. The kind of energy that makes people want more, want to come back.

If you are losing lots of people as the rally is going, you need to face the reality that you have failed to organize a good rally. You need to ask yourself what went wrong -- because, to be sure, something did. If you lost half the crowd over the course of your two-hour rally, something went very wrong.

Maybe people in the back couldn't hear anything because the sound system was too small. Maybe the speakers were preachy. Maybe there were too many speakers. Maybe they didn't know how to use microphones and couldn't be heard, even though the sound system was adequate. Maybe they were reading their speeches from pieces of paper that they couldn't see very well. Maybe there was barely any music, or the music that you had wasn't any good, or lacked sufficient mass appeal. Maybe you were focusing too much on letting everybody say something, rather than focusing on how the overall rally should flow.

I have attended a few rallies like that very recently, in the interest of full disclosure, which is really what inspired me to write this, as a form of self-therapy. I feel a little better now. If anybody reads this, shares it with their friends and tells me they found something useful in it, I will feel even more better.

Sunday, January 22, 2017

More Forgotten Folk: Reflections on Subsisting as a Musician in 2017

I was driving across Oregon yesterday, thinking about whether I might be able to afford to do another recording project this year -- like in a studio with a band over the course of a week or two, the kind of recording project that costs many thousands of dollars to do right -- when it hit me. This year is really different from other years. If you're a touring musician and you're reading this, I'd be really curious to hear from you.

Because for me, the last big tour I did was the first time I've ever toured for two months, doing forty gigs or so in several different countries, and barely sold any CDs. I think I sold around 100 by the end -- about 10% of what I used to sell on a tour like that.

It takes me a long time to really notice these things, but it seems we have now truly entered the post-CD era. For those of you who are not trying to make a living as performers -- from a consumer perspective you could say -- this may not mean much. We're all overwhelmed with data of all kinds, including streaming music services and YouTube videos. Most of us don't have CD players anymore, and we listen to music online. Maybe we subscribe to a streaming service so we can listen to whatever we want without ads, or maybe we put up with the ads to avoid paying any monthly fees, or maybe we find our free music in innumerable other corners of the web.

And somehow, regardless of whether there's anybody left in the world who is able to make a living as a musician, the internet will be full of great, free music. When independent musicians stop touring and find another line of work, they may still manage to record -- they'll spend money they earn from their day jobs on that. They'll do it because it satisfies some need, maybe various needs -- but for most formerly professional independent touring musicians that I know, making a living is no longer one of those needs that they can satisfy.

When they stop touring, they're generally not going to announce to their email lists that they can't afford to tour anymore, that nobody buys their CDs anymore, that they're not making any money with the streaming services, that they have failed to deal with the new post-CD reality. No matter how well they may understand the impossible math involved with the new reality, on some level they feel like they have failed -- presumably because they're not good enough -- and they will go quietly into semi-retirement. You may notice that they stop sending emails about their upcoming tours, because the tours aren't happening. Or, more likely, you won't notice, because you already get way too many emails.

I enthusiastically embraced the new technology. The system was totally broken before the internet came along, so what did I have to lose? Like way over 99% of other professional, independent musicians who never got commercial or "public" radio airplay, approximately nothing -- but much to gain. And many of us did gain -- we gained bigger followings out there in cyberspace. To some extent, for some of us, this increased attendance at some of our shows, sometimes. In the early years, it might have caused an uptick in CD sales for some artists -- but no longer, in the post-CD, largely post-download, streaming service era of music.

I enthusiastically embraced the new, old ideas for how we indy musicians can survive in the modern era. I crowdsourced a recording project before Kickstarter existed, and I started up a CSA before Patreon existed. And I think crowdsourcing is really cool, to be sure. It has allowed me to continue to make a living as a musician, and I'm very thankful for that, and thankful for all the support.

But the whole situation is very troubling to me. Not so much my own situation, but what I see around me. Because what I see around me is most musicians falling through the cracks, so to speak. They quietly stop touring, they mostly stop recording. They make a foray into the world of crowdfunding, but they don't do it with sufficient enthusiasm and it doesn't work out well and they give up again.

It's long been the case that being good isn't good enough for musicians -- you can't just be good at your craft, you also have to be good at marketing, if you want to have a hope of making a living at it. The difference now is that there are whole other levels of marketing you have to be good at -- and one of what used to be your two main income streams no longer exists.

A lot of people just haven't been able to cope with this, or haven't wanted to try. Because the new economy for musicians is all about begging. Not just trying to get gigs and trying to get audiences anymore. Audience members used to buy your CDs, depending on factors like whether they were blown away by your performance and whether you have a new CD since the last one they bought. Now we also have to try to get people to pay for us to make recordings -- so that we can give them away.

With all the "everything is progress" propaganda out there, it's easy to get swept up in the popular new crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and Patreon. There are lots of real success stories -- and those are the ones you hear about. But it occurred to me as I was driving yesterday that these platforms didn't become popular for no reason. They didn't become popular because the concepts were just invented and people thought they were cool.

They became popular, mostly, I'm pretty sure, because of the desperation of those of us trying to cling to the idea that it may still be possible to make a living as a touring performer.

That desperation has gone through phases. The first phase coincided with the rise of Kickstarter. That was the phase when CD sales were drastically down, but not totally gone.

The next phase of desperation coincided with the rise of Patreon (and Bandcamp and others). That's the phase we're in now, with the almost total elimination of the phenomenon of physical recordings. (Never mind whatever you've heard about the rise of vinyl, etc. It's statistically irrelevant, as far as I can see.)

To demystify and perhaps slightly oversimplify the math that used to be involved with being an indy touring musician, it went something like this: if you were someone with a small but loyal following and you knew how to work with your fans and supporters and could successfully organize tours, you might do 100 gigs in a year, which effectively means spending most of the year on the road. Let's say you manage to average $300 per gig, and you're supporting a family of four and you live in a rapidly-gentrifying US city, and your rent has doubled over the past ten years. And then let's say that out of that $30,000 you've made from your gigs, you're spending a third of that on travel costs, leaving you with $20,000.

You might be able to support your family on $20,000, but you certainly will have nothing left over for anything other than food, rent, and clothing from Goodwill. Ah, but this is before the post-CD era, so in addition to doing those gigs, you're also selling CDs. I used to sell around 3,000 CDs in a typical year. After spending $5,000 making the CD at a studio and giving away a few hundred CDs to community radio stations, that still left me with another $20,000 in income every year from CD sales, the vast majority of them at shows.

So, when that $20,000 turned into $10,000 -- for me and I suspect for thousands and thousands of other indy touring performers -- along came Kickstarter. OK, so now we can make up for the losses by crowdfunding the expenses of making the CD. Or at least those of us who are willing to spend much of our time begging for money can. Those of us who didn't want to, or weren't good at it were out of the game at that point. Or working other jobs in order to fund their recording habit -- but no more touring, except maybe in a very limited way, during work vacations.

But then that annual $10,000 turned into $2,000, and the floor dropped out from under us in terms of that essential second stream of income, CD sales.

Around the time that this was happening, along came Patreon, and other platforms using this old NPR/Pacifica concept of supporting someone that produces a free service by subscribing to them at a rate of $5 or $10 a month.

This was then the next process of elimination for indy touring musicians, and I think it will ultimately result in a much greater wave of extinction than the wave that coincided with the rise of Kickstarter. Because before, you could tighten your belt. You, if you were like me, might have been making enough money that you had some room for belt-tightening that didn't end you up in a tent on the sidewalk.

Now, there's no more belt-tightening. The sales are just gone. Replaced by streaming services that pay virtually nothing. I don't know the stats on the average touring musician out there -- the ones like me that have enough of a following to make a living, who used to sell thousands of CDs in an average year. But for me, those $20,000 in revenue from annual CD sales have been replaced by a trickle of about $120 per month on average from royalties, when you add it all up, between Spotify, iTunes, etc.

Now, unless you can survive solely from ticket sales for shows, without selling any merch, you're out of the game unless you're really good at begging. You're not just trying to replace the lost income required to make recordings every now and then. You need to replace the income you lost from all your CD sales -- which is far greater than the cost of making the recordings.

I've been thinking a lot about why it's so hard for so many musicians to do this begging for money. Aside from pride or just lack of interest in engaging in such activities for whatever other reasons, there's the fact that you have to convince your fans -- many of whom might not even make as much money as you do -- to donate money to fund a recording project which costs many thousands of dollars.

Regular people who aren't professional musicians look at this $5,000 or $10,000 goal and they think, really? Can't you just put your phone on a tripod and hit "record"?

One of the many maddening things about being a musician is the knowledge that most people will only notice something when it's not working. They'll hear a bass note that's horribly out of tune, but they won't notice the bass line at all if it's all in tune. It effects them subliminally, but not consciously. And to try to explain to them why it's so important for the bass line to exist, and to be in tune, and to be recorded with a really good microphone in an isolated room in a building that was built for the purpose of being a recording studio, and why it should take hours of your time, the bass player's time, and the time of a producer and an engineer, to record one bass line for one song, well, it's hard. In the end they just have to trust you that it really costs so much to make a good recording.

I know that the situation I'm describing applies not just to really indy musicians like me, but also to more established performers, like the kind who attract crowds in the hundreds or low thousands, who typically might spend more like $50,000 to make and promote a new recording. They're feeling the hit, and they're making lower-budget recordings in many cases, I know for a fact. Whether the pop stars are feeling the hit is not even a matter of question -- they are, and they sometimes complain about it loudly, such as Taylor Swift's recent spat with Apple. Of course, for them, a hundred million views on YouTube still results in pretty good money, but nothing like the profits involved with selling physical merch.

And as for the other 99.99% of musicians, who might get a respectable hundred thousand views on YouTube in a given year if they've got a serious DIY following? YouTube is secretive about their method for determining royalties, but I can tell you from personal experience that 100,000 views on YouTube or 100,000 streams on Spotify translates into approximately jack shit.

So when Trump talks about the forgotten people who don't have those factory and mining jobs anymore, nobody's going to mention the statistically irrelevant class of people known as professional touring musicians. But we musicians have also been put out of work by the free market, essentially.

Maybe the unemployed miners should try crowdsourcing their income, too? Ah, but they probably don't all have enough fans they can appeal to for mercy (aside from other unemployed miners). That makes us musicians the lucky ones, I guess. It's all relative.

Tuesday, January 3, 2017

I vacillate between being horrified by Trump and being horrified by all the people who are actively trying to make sure I'm horrified by Trump. Specifically, the ones that run nonprofits, NGOs, and other money-grubbing "activists." I don't know what they do with the rest of their lives, but whenever it involves my inbox, it has to do with fear-mongering and raising money, in equal measure.

Evidently, these groups are making more money than ever before since the election. (This has been all over the press.) They can presumably use all the money to raise more money, and to have the occasional protest, to make sure we remember that they're "activists," so we can give them more money.

I'm trying to organize this year's concert tour. It's what I do, regardless of who's in the White House. I thought for about two seconds about figuring out how to make it a specifically anti-Trump tour, but then I felt nauseated and had to stop thinking about doing that. See, I'm absolutely certain I could get lots more gigs if I jumped on the bandwagon. But my principles are more important to me than money, so I can't do it.

I'm so tired of referring to the political parties and their figureheads by their meaningless names. From now on I'm going to use my own invented names, which make more sense. The Party of Capitalism and Imperialism #1 and the Party of Capitalism and Imperialism #2 -- POCI1 and POCI2 (pronounced "pah-kee," I think).

POCI1 has been in power for the past eight years. While in power, they have helped turn the USA into the fracking capital of the world. There's no more clean water left in several states. We had the worst environmental disaster in the history of the world -- and I'm not talking about fracking, I'm talking about the Gulf of Mexico. After that, deep water off-shore oil drilling continued. POCI1 deported millions of undocumented human beings back to war zones south of the US border. POCI1 facilitated a violent military coup in Honduras, violently overthrew the government of Libya, continued military occupations of several countries initiated by POCI2 before them, tried hard to negotiate a massive "free trade" treaty, launched innumerable drone attacks against civilians in many different countries, and pushed hard to expand the anti-Russian military alliance called NATO. And that's only a few of the things POCI1 did, only in the past eight years!

During the eight years before POCI1, when POCI2 was in power, in a nutshell, they did all the same shit. They didn't deport as many people or jail as many whistleblowers or launch as many drone strikes, but they very violently invaded and occupied two countries, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians in the process. They didn't do as much fracking, but it was early in the fracking era when they were in power, and the VP of POCI2 ran the company that invented the practice.

While POCI1 was in power -- led for the past eight years by a handsome, eloquent black man from a massive, impoverished, extremely violent US city -- the NRA raised more money than ever, by fear-mongering. By telling their constituency that POCI1 was going to take away our guns. Now that POCI2 is coming back into power, other "activist" groups are telling us to give them money because POCI2 is going to deport even more people than POCI1 did -- though they don't put it that way. We should give them money because POCI2 is going to be even more friendly to the rich, to neoliberalism, to big business -- but they don't put it that way.

They don't put it that way at all. They would have us believe that there is a battle between good and evil going on. On one side, POCI1 and the "activist" groups defending our civil liberties and the environment. On the other side, the evil POCI2 and the haters and deniers and their army of orcs.

I wish reality were so simple. But it's not. And as long as these "activist" groups are trying to convince us it is, just so they can make more money from our fear, they are part of the problem. I don't know how to jumpstart a militant mass movement for real social change any more than you do.

But I do know this: the way forward will not involve the leadership of morally bankrupt, cynical people or organizations that would have us believe there are sufficiently significant differences between POCI1 and POCI2 that we should give a shit which one is driving the train that is speeding towards the cliff. Don't mistake reality for Middle Earth. There is no Lothlorien among these politicians and their hangers-on. Only Mordor.